piss cum shit fuck etc etc
A Young Dennis Cooper, 1982. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Piss cum shit fuck ass blood sick gore dope hurt death fuck-up – these are a few of my favourite things.
…Is what I imagine he says to himself, mantra-like, before sitting down to write each of his works. Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you there. I know I don’t strike people as one to be this foul-mouthed right off the bat. Just giving you a heads up, this one’s not for the easily scandalised.
When I picked up The Sluts last summer, I didn’t know much about Dennis Cooper. Only things I’d heard were from obscure internet book people, who said it’s one of 1) the scariest (its online reputation surpassed only by House of Leaves, probably), 2) the most depraved, and 3) the most fascinating, entrancing, crazy queer novels out there. Because I would call myself a fan of punk literature, and specifically queer punk literature (less probability of unnecessarily gratuitous violence against women which, apart from the shock factor component that is to be expected, adds nothing to the story). And in that one hot summer afternoon, I was lost.
The one layer of sunscreen I put on in the morning had to make do, cause I was not about to move from the hammock until I finished unpacking the mystery hidden within those pages. You see, it’s written entirely in postings from an internet forum where people rate their experiences with gay escorts, and most of them revolve around this one guy named Brad – an apparently otherworldly piece of ass. But Brad is elusive, visibly struggling with substance abuse, and as the mythology of his person expands (is he even of age? Is he really that handsome? Will he really allow anything to be done to him?), he soon becomes quite exclusive and (spoiler alert… or is it?) meets a tragic, gut-churning end of torture, castration, mutilation, and death. This, in itself, is only the hook, scratching the surface of what makes the work actually interesting. Never before have I read any other writing that actually managed to pin down the nature of the internet (or, the "old days" internet, when anonymity was anonymity for better and worse, when you could easily assume whatever identity without being discovered all that soon, when myths were created and debunked, only to be recreated, escalated, and usually to then fizzle out with no bang. This addressed it all, giving both bang and fizzle, and was truly horrifying. Because by the time you get to the end, you realise there is no way for you to get to the truth. Now that (!) is what I’m a sucker for.
I allowed myself to fall into the Cooper rabbit hole. I could have sworn someone who wrote an internet novel this accurate can’t possibly be older than mid-40s. Especially finding out that he still maintains an online presence of both a website and a blog. Unfortunately the original version of the blog, then called The Weaklings, got taken down for violating Blogger’s terms of service after being active for around a decade (apparently reposting and commenting on male escort profiles to get to the truth of their being and explore what they indicate of the queer community is a no-no for Google), and its biggest estimated loss is the novel in GIFs that the author managed to complete on the platform – poof, all gone. Now, we can’t be sure what happened to the original posted there, but I’m happy to report that since then Cooper’s finished a couple GIF novels and collections of stories and poetry, some of which you can read at Kiddiepunk here.
This guy is 70. I don’t know how he managed this. I’m barely 21 and I already feel like I’m losing grasp of the Internet. Yet here he is, transgressive as ever, bending the boundaries of both the formats of storytelling and the contents of stories themselves.
From here I moved on to the George Miles cycle, often deemed his most notable work. The first one, Closer, takes on multiple perspectives of young queers in a high school setting. It’s separate stories of different lives that intertwine, but ultimately somehow revolve around the captivating George. They’re always high on something, or fucking to escape something, or both. They contort the truth and withhold information. They overshare. They search for aims and turn to creativity (a punk artist gaining traction for his unsettling portraits – he later creates a series of duets consisting of the subject’s face and their asshole; an amateur filmmaker wanting to create “art-porn”; a delusional pretty boy going about his life as if he’s a world-famous rockstar). This is never enough to fill the void. This, always, ends in excruciating emotional or physical pain.
I hear you saying it. It’s gay-bashing you’re reading gay-bashing how dare you criticise other authors for this and yet you spend your time reading trauma porn how dare you who are you who gave you the right to–
Shh. You see, yes, it’s true. These gays get bashed. But you have to understand that their queerness just happens to exist alongside the trauma they endure. It is never its direct cause. It’s addiction, loneliness, being misunderstood, trusting the wrong people, not being loved enough by those closest to them, not allowing themselves to be loved or others to get close. They’re victims of circumstance who should have the power to turn it around but are often too passive to do so. And if not, then it might be too late, and they might have already become the perpetrators of the pain.
It is prose that yearns for true connection, that hides its vulnerability behind the shock factor, that every now and then is allowed to bare itself and offer its heart, even if it will immediately tell you to crush it for the mutual fun of it. When you think you are too desensitised to feel anything, when the witnessed cruelty of the world becomes unbearable, somehow this reaches its hand out to show you that it could get even worse, but also that it is somehow still beautiful.
Or so I thought until I started Frisk, the second instalment. All of a sudden Dennis is there, within the novel, as part of the ensemble cast of characters and an active player in the debauchery. This led to some more googling and…
Holy shit. This is autofictional. George Miles is an actual guy with whom Dennis grew up with. This opened up the possibility of each of these deeply fucked-up, depraved fictional characters to be actual, real people. Every question that The Sluts initially brought up for me – that of self-mythology, of countless instances of unreliable narration, of where the truth ends and the web of phantasmic idealizations and grotesque profanations begins – became ever more relevant after this discovery. All that I came to ask about the Brad character, I was now asking about the real George Miles and the author himself.
I hate to disappoint but ultimately, this is no investigative piece. Because frankly I wouldn’t want it to be. Just like anything, I don’t actually want to know.
Ok, part of me does. I even came to realise that Cooper lived here, in Amsterdam, for a couple years and this is where he began writing the cycle. Immediately I got carried over by the fantasy of possibly reaching out to him before I finish this piece, of getting him to tell me about his times in the city and maybe to reveal some of the mystery of his work. I click the “contact” tab on his website. A new window pops open. “Contact Dennis Cooper through his blog”. I open the blog. All I get is a link that leads me back to the website.
Dennis Cooper is 70 years old and to my knowledge, currently resides in Paris, France and frequently visits LA. He is the author of short stories, poems, novels – in words and moving images. He’s a frequent collaborator of Gisèle Vienne’s, resulting in performances I would kill to see. He is one talented, mysterious, depraved motherfucker – and I can’t get enough of it. If you’re as intrigued as me, you can visit his website or read the blog. Explore the novels, if you dare.
